


Season of Mists

by clutzycricket



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Haunted Houses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 00:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5071840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clutzycricket/pseuds/clutzycricket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Joffrey drags her halfway across the country to move to lonely Summerhall House, she knew he had ulterior motives. </p>
<p>She just wasn't expecting these sort of motives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Season of Mists

Sansa hated the house. It was far too big for two people, which would be alright if she could bring it alive with friends and family, but aside from a few chats at family dinners with Renly Baratheon, Joffrey’s side of the family studiously ignored her attempts to get to know them. And as for her side of the family…

Her father had been delighted when his oldest friend’s son had asked her out, and practical minded Mother had seen the good in dating and socializing with the Baratheon-Lannister clan, believing it would help her chances.

Neither of them knew what Joffrey was really like, though, and he kept them away as often as he could. Like this move, which was hours away from her childhood home.

It was also far too gloomy, built in the days when glass was impractical and wiring nonexistent, the ceilings high and the rooms seemingly built to swallow noise, leading to deep, gloomy shadows and the feeling of being consumed when you were alone.

Well, Joffrey wasn’t home, and she wanted to go out. so she went down to the town to do some shopping.

She was thinking about what she could make for dinner that night, free of any obligations, when she crashed into someone.

“Ah, god, sorry,” he said, righting her basket before it could tip. “Wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”

“I wasn’t either,” Sansa said, apologizing automatically. The man was a few years older than her, wiry with a shocking head of blonde hair and a Metallica t-shirt that had seen better days.

“You’re new around here? Not that I make a habit of stalking my neighbors, but it is a small town,” he said, fiddling with his hands, wearing his basket on his wrist.

“I just moved here with my boyfriend, we live up in Summerhall,” she explained, hoping her unease didn’t show.

His eyes widened. “That old… I mean lovely, stately, home that isn’t all a likely scene of a future horror movie?”

She ducked her head to hide a smile. “It is awful, isn’t it?”

“Well, if you hear anything rattling chains late at night, you can find me living up about the Shy Maid Pub,” he said. “Ask for Griff. My friends and I used to hear horror stories about that place.”

~

She was plagued by dreams in Summerhall- blood and fire and the feeling of sinking into something, clawing her way up as she was dragged down by her ankles, unable to breathe. When Joffrey was there, either he slept through, or, as he’d been doing more and more, had taken to sending her off to a guest room.

She woke to the light she left on by her bedside table turned off, every night.

She would have brushed it off as an unfortunate set of circumstances turning into a constellation, except for the other events. Flickers out of the corners of her eye, her neat and orderly kitchen out of order at random times, the sound of footsteps.

Joffrey, it seemed, was irritatingly unaffected by these events. He was often away visiting his mother’s family, and when he was there, he locked himself in the study.

Sansa wondered, occasionally, if his visits to his mother’s family actually were visits other women. Well, they could have Joffrey and this eerie pile.

~

Joffrey was still not home a week later, and she was still balanced on the knife’s edge of relief at not dealing with his moods and unease at dealing with the house.

There was, she decided, something possibly unhealthy about that.

She decided to go to dinner at the Shy Maid that night, resolving that she didn’t want to deal with dishes tonight on top of anything else.

She patted the doorframe. “I’ll be back,” she said, on a whim. “No eating people.”

The house let out a groaning, settling noise, and she didn’t jump.

The Shy Maid had a vaguely nautical theme, and Griff’s face lit up when he saw her. The man with him rolled his eyes.

“Hey!” Griff said. “This is my friend Rolly Duckfield, known as Duck. Both because of the name and because he kind of fell out of a boat a lot in high school.”

“I blame you,” Duck said, his shock of orange hair sticking up in all directions, including a ducktail. “Sign up for crew, you said. It’ll be fun, you said. You’re a fucking liar, Griff.”

“And yet we all managed to keep our balance,” Griff said, raising his eyebrows. “My Aunt Dany and her peacock shit boytoy were better than you.”

“And this is the Titian painting made flesh that Griff was telling me about,” Duck said, focusing on Sansa with a teasing grin.

“I… ah, forgot to get your name,” Griff blushed, looking as red as Sansa felt.

“I’m amazed he remembered his,” Duck muttered.

“Sansa Stark,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear.

“Well, Sansa Stark, try the chicken parm, it’s fantastic,” Duck said. “Ysilla will come up with a variation just for you eventually.”

She watched them carefully.

“We don’t bite,” Duck said.

“I am in fact a natural blonde,” Griff said solemnly. “You can check. And yes, I have gotten every punk rock joke ever.”

Sansa placed her order and sat with them, laughing as she ate. It was… nice, something she hadn’t had for ages.

Which made the dreadful swooping in her stomach when she saw Joffrey’s red sports car all the worse.

“Where were you?” he asked, looking annoyed. About a six out of ten, she thought resignedly.

“I went to get dinner- I thought you wouldn’t be home, and I was lonely, so being surrounded by people was nice,” she said lightly. “It was nice, imagine the conversations I might have had with you- did you see some of the shops here? We could use them for some of the restoration, or replacing the furniture and decor. I was waiting for your approval, but the music room could use some redoing, to improve the way sound works with the furniture, some retuning…”

Joffrey looked at her suspiciously. “I like the decor.”

“Most of it is lovely,” Sansa lied. “But some of it is in need of professional restoration- the piano is dreadfully out of tune, and some of the curtains were never put away, so they should be replaced.”

“I’ll choose, but I don’t see why we need a new piano,” Joffrey scowled. “I’m going to bed. Leave me alone.”

Sansa raised her eyebrows. The piano annoyed her, but she shouldn’t have pushed. She could go after the kitchen with a more deft hand in a few days, at least.

And if he didn’t want sex, she wasn’t going to complain. Now she was rattling in this gloomy cage, she didn’t see why she should bother putting on cover-up.

~

Well, she found out why four days later, when she was surveying the garden. The land technically took up twelve acres, and the garden was large enough to require a map showing what had originally been planted where.

She was wishing for a jacket despite the warmth of the day, the vines snagging on her bare arms.

There was a rustling sound behind her, and she turned around. “Joffrey?” she called. He’d holed up in the house, kicking her out saying she was being useless, so she’d taken the map and gone to see what could be salvaged, if anything, from the garden.

No one was behind her, just the narrow, half-overgrown path, stones missing and weeds growing between what was there.

“Hello?” she called.

It might have been a fox, she mused, going on. She saw choking ivy along the ground, a few strong shrubs that would need professional tending, and a few flashes of wildflowers and what the map said was aconite.

There was another, louder crash, and Sansa screamed.

“Sorry, sorry, I was trying to find you, but I got a bit… I always sucked at mazes as a kid,” Griff said, looking sheepish. “Shit, Sansa, get up,” he said, pulling her up. “Don’t move.”

He helped her up carefully, not letting her move without his hands guide her. He was surprisingly strong, though she should have guessed, a distant part of Sansa thought. His hands were rough, too, calloused and scarred. “What was wrong?” she asked, looking for snakes.

“The wolfsbane- my uncle is a forensic toxicologist, and when we went hiking in these woods he was pretty specific about not touching that. He said it could be absorbed through the skin, especially scratches. Bog aspohodel isn’t much better, but that’s mostly animals.” He looked her over, seeming to sharpen somehow when he got a good look at her upper arm. “Is your boyfriend back home?”

Sansa didn’t answer.

“The Shy Maid’s open if you need it,” he shrugged. “I saw him in town- trust me, if you want someone to take him, Duck and I could do it. He doesn’t look like he knows how to fistfight.” He frowned, looking genuinely upset. “I’m trying to offer help, but I’m probably making a mess of it. Feel free to tell me to go to hell.”

“The Lannisters don’t like to lose,” Sansa said. She’d expressed some doubts about dating Joffrey once. The timing of the events afterwards had made sure that she wasn’t going to do that again. Her mother wouldn’t forgive her.

(Bran had been so still.)

“Ah, well, I know the Lannisters,” Griff didn’t look terribly worried. “The door is still there.”

“Why are you here?” she asked.

He looked around. “I was hoping to sed… see the house,” he said, stuttering.

“Joffrey won’t let anyone inside right now,” she said. “But he leaves tomorrow for a family thing…”

“May I have a tour?” he asked, hands in his pockets.

“I think that could work,” she said, looking at the buzz of dragonflies in the pretty, deadly plants. “But Griff?”

“Yes?”

“I think you might be right about the house being haunted.”

~

“Did you even wait until he pulled out of the drive?” Sansa asked, face in her hands. Griff was bouncing in place at the doorway.

“Of course! I know better than to make things worse for you,” he said. “My sister would kick my balls up between my ears if I was that kind of reckless.”

That was the third time he’d mentioned a family, but she didn’t even have a last name- or, she suspected, a proper first name.

“This place looks like a tomb,” he said, examining his face in a spotted, tarnished mirror. “How do you live in here?”

“Movies and fashion,” Sansa said frankly. “Also because I have to.”

“I’m just saying, this is nothing a few coats of paint and that exploding cement truck from Mythbusters couldn’t solve,” Griff said, turning about the room.

Sansa giggled at that, and she realized it was the first time she laughed in Summerhall.

He bounded around, and she half-chased him, until they got to the locked study.

“Joffrey keeps it locked,” Sansa said. It was the old lock, from the last permanent owners of the house.

“Ah, well, that sister of mine insisted I learn to pick a lock,” he said, pulling the tools out. “Said if I was going to be a family fool, I was going to be a resourceful one.” He looked fond as he said it, so Sansa suspected it was an old joke.

The study…

“Oh, god,” Sansa said, looking at the photographs and newsclippings, her brain automatically going to that cold, distant place that allowed her to function and make decisions when things were intolerable.

“A slaughter about seventy-five years ago,” Griff said reading from the clippings, “Aegon Targaryen the Fifth, a host of his relatives, and only a few disoriented survivors. It was assumed a cult had killed them, though some of the gossipier newspapers said he was involved in the occult.”

Sansa was looking at the more recent articles. “I need your phone.” She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care, this was too much…

“Sending the photos on?” he said, studying her. “He has a spy app on your phone?”

She nodded, silent. Joffrey’d killed people.

The room went cold, and Sansa turned to look behind Griff, who was taking photos and texting them to someone.

The ghost was a woman with dark pits for eyes and ragged ribbons of hair, staring curiously at him.

“Griff… remember what I said yesterday?” Sansa said shakily. He looked at her pale face.

The ghost let out a wail. “Aegon!”

“Nope, wrong one!” he said, leaping back and landing on his rear, staying between Sansa and the ghost. “Few generations and types of stupidity between us, sorry!”

The ghost wailed again, then seemed to pull apart.

“What,” Sansa said, looking down at him, was that.

“Well, Griff is kind of a nickname,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “My full name is Aegon Targaryen. The Sixth, if you want to get stuffy. But I had to choose between Egg and Griff as a nickname, and Griff stuck, which is a story…” he drifted off. “And that’s not the point.”

“Well, Summerhall used to belong to my family, before the massacre. My grandparents and my …great-aunt? I think it was great-aunt, were two of the survivors mentioned. My grandparents were here, and Rhaelle had apparently not spoken much with my family since she married her Baratheon husband.” He waited a beat as he stood.

Sansa sighed. “Joffrey’s family?”

“Great-grandfather, I believe,” he said, thinking about it, ticking them off. “Ormund, Steffon, Robert, Fuckwit. Yup. Well, the end of the house’s use was in the days of Rhaelle’s father, Aegon the Fifth, and his wife Betha Blackwood.”

“Well, supposedly my… great-great grandfather was a politician who was trying to get his reforms through, and getting discouraged as time went by and it kept failing,” Griff said, brushing his hair back absently. “And that drove him to slightly desperate arcane measures.”

“So he summoned a demon,” Sansa said, raising an eyebrow.

“As you do,” Griff grinned, dark eyes mischievous.

“And you decided that it was your duty to make sure the demon was banished,” Sansa continued.

“Well, yes,” he said. “But apparently my cousin decided to beat me to it.” He looked wary at that. “Or whatever he was doing.”

She couldn’t see Joffrey deciding to do something risky and noble, so it probably wasn’t banishing the demon. “Did you meet me to get an in with us?” she asked.

He laughed. “You’re crediting me with an amount of forward thinking and planning that my cousins would all tell you I don’t have,” he said. “I think all we need to do is…”

“Hide!” came another voice, whispery and male. “Hide!”

They looked at each other and went out of the study, hoping they didn’t have anything out of place. Aegon relocked it.

“Best place to hide?” he said. Sansa had peered out of her bedroom window, gathering some laundry in a half-hearted pile. She could see Joffrey’s car.

“Music room- go through the hidden stairs…” she found a painting of twin blonde girls who did have a resemblance to Griff, now she knew to look. “Here. The music room is on the ground floor and has French doors if you need to flee.”

“I’m waiting on the steps,” he said, mulishly. “You are getting out.”

“He’ll… he hit my brother with a car and he got away with it,” Sansa hissed. “If he has…” The rest of her sentence was too absurd to say.

“We’ll deal with this, we can,” Griff promised, before kissing her. It was quick and sweet and kinder and more than all of Joffrey’s kisses. He vanished in the staircase.

She shook her head,  and wondered why Joffrey was home.

~

“Sansa,” Joffrey was staring at her, like a cat confronted with a mouse. Sansa smiled. She’d made sure they were in the kitchen, her hamper by the laundry room door.

“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon, but it’s early enough I can make dinner without a problem,” she said, imagining hitting him with a hot skillet.

“That isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, and there was something manic about him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were talking to a Targaryen?”

A skillet right between the eyes.

She stared at the skillet, wondering how the thought had translated into deed, watching Joffrey wobble but not fall.

She kneed him in the balls, because she wasn’t Arya “Tiny Terror” Stark’s sister for nothing.

“GRIFF!” she shouted. “Got a plan?”

He ran in, staring at them. “You could keep hitting him?”

The house groaned, and they looked at each other. “Er…”

Joffrey laughed. “Did you think you could win?”

Griff rolled his eyes and sighed. “Shut your mouth and get your fool self out of this house and down to hell.”

Joffrey screamed, his eyes turning black, and bleeding.

Sansa jumped back.

“What the hell?” she asked.

“…I didn’t expect that to work,” Griff said, looking at Joffrey’s body. “I’ll call the police. The ghosts should be tired out, and I think I accidentally exorcised the demon.”

Sansa stared. “Explain.”

“My family did this, so I could tell him to fuck off,” Griff said. “My great-grandfather was older, so my claim was better. Joffrey let the demon too far into him, though, hence the…”

“Bleeding,” Sansa said, preparing the story for public consumption. The bleeding would explain her worries about CPR, and there was possibly a physical cause for the bleeding. She didn’t need to know.

“About the kiss…” Griff looked at her, shy. “I know… bad timing. If you ever decide you want to… my door is open.”

Later, when she finally met Rhaenys, the older woman would slap him over the head and point out that talking about romance over dead bodies wasn’t a good plan.

Sansa was used to Griff and his lack of brain to mouth filter, though, which never did get better- which had led to a few embarrassing family dinners, but, as she told him, he was the polar opposite of Joffrey.

That made up for a few quirky comments, she decided, even if he had a talent for getting in trouble. 


End file.
